Extras

Author: KB

Scrivener 2.0 for macOS was released in November 2010, and Scrivener 1.0 for Windows in November 2011. Since then both have seen plenty of new features and refinements added in free updates, and more and more people have used Scrivener to write their books. But we’re not standing still: for a while now we’ve been beavering away on the next big release of Scrivener.

I’m talking, of course, about Scrivener 3—coming soon to a screen near you.

Featuring a refreshed UI and some major overhauls, our focus for Scrivener 3 has been not only on new features but also on consolidating and simplifying what’s already there. We’ve taken years of experience of writing in Scrivener, both our own and that of our users, and poured it into Scrivener 3. The result is the best version of Scrivener yet, and we can’t wait to get it into the hands of our users.

Soon, we’ll start posting a series of blog posts about what you can expect. For now, here’s what you need to know about the release.

Scrivener 3 for macOS

Along with the updated features and the revamped interface, Scrivener 3 on macOS has been rewritten as a 64-bit app and to take advantage of new Mac technologies under the hood. Scrivener is more than ten years old now, so for 3.0, whole swathes of code and UI elements have been recoded and rebuilt from the ground up to stand Scrivener in good stead for the next ten years. As a result, Scrivener 3 for macOS will require macOS 10.12 Sierra or above to run.

I’ve been working on Scrivener 3 for a long time, but it’s now in beta-testing and is nearly ready. We’re finalising the updated manual and preparing for release later this year.

Scrivener 3 for Windows

“Wait!” you cry, “Can you guys not count?” Well, we can, but, mavericks that we are, we are eschewing all sense of sequence and jumping straight from Scrivener 1 to Scrivener 3 on the Windows platform. Why? Because our daring duo of Windows programmers has been working very hard to attain parity with Scrivener 3 on macOS. It will look every bit as beautiful as the macOS version, has been reworked to better work with high resolutions, and will bring the feature set much more into line across the two platforms.

Scrivener 3 for Windows is still in development and will follow a few months behind the macOS release. As much as we’d love to release both versions at the same time, the only way we could do so would be by artificially holding back the macOS version for several months. The Windows team has always had to battle not only with the macOS version having a five year head-start, but also with having to write a lot more custom code because of platform differences. So Scrivener for Windows is catching up, but our Windows users still have a little longer to wait. Because we want to make sure it’s rock solid and everything our users have been dreaming of, for now all we can say is that Scrivener 3 for Windows will be released when it’s ready, most likely some time in 2018.

However! The good news is that the more intrepid among you don’t have to wait until 2018 to try Scrivener 3 for Windows. We’ll be releasing an early access beta of Scrivener 3 for Windows on the same day that Scrivener 3 for macOS is released for sale. Anybody who owns Scrivener 1 will be able to run the beta (although it will initially be a work in progress with missing features, which is why I say it’s for the more intrepid). The Windows beta will also allow cross-platform users to upgrade their Mac version and continue to work between platforms with the updated file format.

Scrivener 3 is a Paid Update

Scrivener 3 is the first paid update in over six years. This means that if you own Scrivener 1 or 2 and want to use Scrivener 3, you will need to pay an update fee. (We haven’t yet set the price, but it will be around the same as it was for going from 1.x to 2.0 on the Mac.) There will be free updates for those who bought within a limited time period prior to the release date (more news on that soon). Two notes on this:

Windows users won’t need to pay the update fee until Scrivener 3 is released on Windows. Owners of Scrivener 1 will be able to use the Scrivener 3 betas for free until then, at which point the betas will stop working and you’ll need to pay for the upgrade.

Mac users who bought through the Mac App Store will need to pay full price again simply because Apple allows for no way of providing upgrade pricing on the App Store. We’ll be happy to provide a discount on our own store for any Mac App Store users who email us with proof of purchase, but you won’t be able to get the update on the Mac App Store without paying full price. We wish it weren’t so, but we have no control over how the App Store works.

Scrivener for iOS

Scrivener for iOS is already set up to work with Scrivener 3 when it’s released. And we’ll be continuing to update Scrivener for iOS, too, of course. At the moment I’m focusing on iOS 11 support and improvements, such as the new possibilities that Files app brings.

Scapple

…has not been forgotten! Scrivener has taken a front seat for a long time, but once Scrivener 3 is out, we intend to spend some quality time with our Scapple code.

And Finally…

Over the next few weeks, we’ll start talking about what’s new in Scrivener 3 and what’s been changed. Until then, I’ll leave you with a couple of screenshots, one from macOS, one from Windows. We can’t wait to show you more.

Many thanks to the lovely Apple folk at all the stores that have included Scrivener for iPad in their “Best of 2016” app picks. It’s been a great year (for Scrivener, I mean – clearly it’s not been a great year for celebrities), and being picked as one of the Best of 2016 is a spiffing way to end it.

My sincere thanks to everyone who has supported us this year and all the past years, by giving us nice reviews, telling your friends about Scrivener, or just, y’know, buying it and using it and creating books and scripts and games and words with it.

I suppose I could get all Matthew McConaughey Oscar-speech-emotional on you, but I think we all know that the best speech of gratitude ever given was that of Hightower when he graduated Police Academy:

Scrivener can contain all sorts of different documents: whether you need to gather together notes, research, character sheets, to-do lists or, you know, some actual writing, Scrivener is a big bucket of everything for your writing project. With all those documents ready to hand, you might want to make some of them stand out a little, so that you can see them at a glance as you browse.

In the Mac and Windows versions, you can apply custom icons to your documents. And in this funky world where one of the biggest cheers at this year’s WWDC was for the announcement that emojis are getting three times bigger in Messages, I think it would be remiss of us not to provide some gratuitous graphical goodness in our iOS version. Which is to say: custom icons! In the iOS version! Three times bigger! (Disclaimer: not actually three times bigger.)

I love custom icons, because when my writing is terrible, I can at least make the document it’s in look purdy (I have a lot of pretty-looking documents). You, however, cool professional that you are, will no doubt use them as structural markers and navigational way-points. Which also works.

A writing app wouldn’t be much use if you couldn’t get your work out of it. In an earlier blog post, we talked about Compile, which allows you to export or print your entire Draft folder (or a subfolder of it) as a single document, piecing together the fragments of your text into a complete manuscript.

Sometimes you’ll want to export (or print) individual documents from Scrivener, however. Fortunately, this couldn’t be simpler: just tap on the “share” button at the bottom of the editor, choose a file format, and off you go. You can choose to email the document to someone, print it, or open it in another app.

Scrivener allows you to export to PDF, Word (.docx), RTF, plain text or Final Draft (.fdx) formats, which means that you can easily share a document with someone on a PC, open a text document in Pages, or send a script document to Final Draft for some final touches.

One of the challenges in bringing a complex, rich text app to iOS is how to provide quick access to a tonne of features on a small screen. Things aren’t so difficult on an iPad Pro, where there is lots of screen real estate, but on an iPhone, space is at a premium.

Another challenge is how to provide a frictionless writing experience with an on-screen keyboard. We’ve been able to add loads of keyboard shortcuts for those using external keyboards, and an external keyboard makes it much easier to navigate through text (using the arrow keys). But what if you don’t have an external keyboard handy?

These challenges have been met with the extended keyboard row: a row of eight buttons that sits across the top of the keyboard (which can be turned on or off). These buttons provide quick access to common commands.

Not just eight buttons: in fact, there are twenty-four, divided into three sets that you can swipe between. By default, there is one set containing common punctuation marks, another to make text selection and navigation easiser, and another for formatting commands such as bold, alignment, highlights and footnotes.

The keyboard row is fully customisable—long tap on any button to bring up a list of commands that are available. Tap one to replace the button you long-pressed with the command you selected.

Along with the extended keyboard row, Scrivener for iOS also supports smart punctuation, so you get curly quotes, ellipses for triple-periods, and em-dashes for double-hyphens automatically as you type (unless you turn smart punctuation off via Settings app).

Scrivener for iOS has a whole raft of cool features that will help you organise your work and refer to research—but at its centre we have worked hard to provide a beautiful writing experience.

Today has been amazing. Seriously. And the reason it has been amazing has been because of you, Scrivener users.

Sure, there have been teething problems, mainly concerning sync, and we are working to improve the documentation and our Knowledge Base, and will continue to look at how we can improve things.

We know there are a few features users want, and I’m looking into them – this is only 1.0 of the iOS version, after all. This is just the beginning.

But above all, we’ve been blown away by our fantastic users. We have had numerous users on our forums helping other users out, helping them get set up. We have had countless users on Twitter, Facebook and our forums telling us how much they love Scrivener for iOS, and telling writers who have never heard of Scrivener all about it. We have had over 150 very kind users already give us great reviews on the App Store in different territories. Just: thank you!

I’ve been working on Scrivener for 12 years now. One day I may even finish The Novel. In the meantime, it’s been brilliant to see so many Scrivener users who have – using Scrivener. I hope to see many more novels and books written using the iOS version – who knows? Either way, one of the best things about the past 12 years has been interacting with our users, and today has been a reconfirmation of what a great user-base we have. So: thank you again. For your enthusiasm. For your support even when it seemed like the iOS version was in limbo. Great users really help us focus on keeping driving Scrivener forward.

And we will continue to drive Scrivener forward. But today is about iOS, so I’ll leave news about big updates to other versions of Scrivener for another day…

In the meantime, get in touch. Talk about what you’re writing on our forums. We love hearing from you.

Scrivener for iOS is now available for sale on the App Store. At the time of writing, it is not yet showing up in searches on the App Store, as it can take several hours for Apple’s records to update. However, you can find it by following this link:

Many thanks to everyone for all the enthusiasm about our Scrivener for iOS release tomorrow! As we’ve been receiving a lot of questions, I just wanted to clear up a few things:

Scrivener will be released in the morning of July 20th UK time. I apologise to our antipodean customers, as I’m aware that it will be very late on the 20th for them, but we need to release it at the start of our own day so that we can deal with as many initial support requests as possible.

Price: Scrivener will cost $19.99 in the US store (“price tier 20” in Apple terminology, which is £14.99 in the UK, for instance).

Requirements: Any iOS device running iOS 9.0 or above.

Availability: Scrivener for iOS will be available in the iOS App Store in all the same countries the macOS version is available in the Mac App Store. (Please note that we are unfortunately unable to sell into territories where neither Apple nor our own accountant handles sales tax.)

Language: The UI for Scrivener 1.0 for iOS will be in English only. We will be adding support for other languages in upcoming free updates. (Translation takes time, so we would have had to delay the release further to get non-English languages in 1.0. This will be a priority over the next couple of months.)

Compatibility: Scrivener for iOS uses Dropbox to sync with the macOS and Windows versions. (In answer to all of our Windows users, yes, of course it works with the Windows version as well as the macOS version!)

If you are an existing customer, please make sure you update Scrivener for macOS or Windows to the latest version (2.8 on the Mac, 1.9.5 on Windows). iOS projects and edits will not be recognised in older desktop versions.

On the subject of existing customers, I’m afraid we are unable to offer discounts on the iOS version to existing customers of the Mac and Windows versions. This just isn’t possible with the App Store, which is the only way we can sell our iOS version – Apple has no facility for providing partial discounts, so there’s just no way for us to do it.

Note that Scrivener for iOS is called… Scrivener

Please be careful when purchasing, as there are other apps available in the App Store that have names similar to Scrivener, which come up in searches for “Scrivener” and which have been designed to open Scrivener files but which are nothing to do with us. The official Scrivener for iOS app is simply called Scrivener. If it’s not called “Scrivener”, it’s not our app.

When Scrivener is available on the App Store, it will be at this link:

Tomorrow’s a big day for us (and it’s been a long time coming!), so thank you again for everyone who has supported us on this journey and shown so much enthusiasm. We hope you like it as much as we do!

Scrivener on the Mac and PC have a fully-featured scriptwriting mode, and there are a lot of scriptwriters using it. Episodes of Luther and Doctor Who, award-winning documentaries and feature films have all been written in Scrivener. And we love our scriptwriter users—so we couldn’t very well leave them in the cold with our iOS version.

To be entirely honest, we don’t just love our scriptwriter users—we’re also a tiny bit scared of them. Your average scriptwriter is not the sort of wordsmith who is (as my mother would have it) backwards in coming forwards. This might be because, to get their names in the credits of a movie, they literally have to fight the other writers to the death using only a rubber spoon and puns from death scenes in Arnold Schwarzenegger movies (“He’s letting off steam”). This makes them tougher than your average coder—so we really couldn’t very well leave them in the cold with our iOS version.

Out of love and fear (but mostly love), then, we have managed to port the Mac’s scriptwriting features across to our iOS version: full script formatting, with import from and export to Final Draft FDX baked right into Scrivener for iOS.

Use tab and return (or keyboard shortcuts if you have an external keyboard) to move between script elements (Scene Heading, Action, Dialogue and the rest), or tap the name of the element at the top of the screen to bring up the elements list. You turn scriptwriting mode on for a project using the project settings, and from there you can decide whether any particular document should use script mode or not, just as you can on macOS and Windows.

Projects created on iOS and only ever used on iOS only support Screenplays. However, if you bring in a project from the Mac or Windows version, or if you sync with the Mac or Windows version and change the scriptwriting settings there, the iOS version will use whatever script format is set for the project, whether that is UK Stage Play, Comic Script, your own custom script format or anything else.

And while the scriptwriting experience is undeniably better on an iPad, we have done everything in our power to make sure that you can comfortably create and edit scripts on an iPhone, too.

Available in all the same territories as we sell our macOS version on the Mac App Store. (Note that 1.0’s UI is English-only, but we will be adding other languages in a free update.)

Thank you to everyone who has been on this journey with us. A huge thank you to the 600+ beta-testers who have helped us squash bugs and (I hope!) provide a stable release version. Thanks to the L&L team, who always push me to make things better and make sure I have the time and space to do so. But most of all, thanks to the gazillion of you have stuck with us and waited so long, through all the problems we had getting our iOS version together. All those of you who love Scrivener nearly as much as we do, and who have been so eager to use it on all your devices. This time next week, you’ll be able to carry your Scrivener projects around in your pocket. I hope you like it.